Microsoft’s IEblog has posted about the release of the “real” Beta 2 version of IE7 for Windows XP SP2. They say:

“This evening we released IE7 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie. This release is not the preview or the update to the preview, but the real Beta 2 of IE7 for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 SP1, and Windows XP 64-bit Edition. Simply: please try it.

“We acted on a lot of the feedback and bug reports from the previous public releases. In particular, I feel good about changes we made based on reports from web developers around some CSS behaviors, application compatibility feedback, reliability data (yes, we do analyze the information that comes when you click “Send Error Report”), and user experience feedback. People on the team will post additional details about changes over the next few days.”

The way Windows Vista is disappearing over the horizon, we’re going to need an XP version sooner rather than later.

An example of the Segoe UI Font.

A European agency has thrown out Microsoft’s registration of the new font that has become a central feature of Windows Vista and Office 12.

The European Union’s Trademark and Design Office, is claiming that Microsoft’s new font for Windows Vista and Office 2007 is a copy of Frutiger Next, a design by Linotype, a German type company. The agency says that Segoe’s letterforms “differ only in minor details” from Frutiger. The three judges in the case noted that Microsoft disputed the documentation of Druckmaschinen’s fonts but “does not contest the claim of the Applicant that they should be considered identical.”

Microsoft has applied for at least eight design registrations in January 2004 for different weights of Segoe UI, its user interface font. However, Linotype’s parent company, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, has appealed against the move.

Jensen Harris, a Microsoft program manager, has blogged:”We’re not just introducing a new UI in Office 12 — we’re also introducing a new UI font. It was conceived, designed, and totally optimized for ClearType,” a technology that smooths fonts on LCD screens. It will be turned on by default for the first time in Windows Vista.

Windows Vista will not now be released to consumers until January 2007, along with Office 2007, which appears to be having the same spasms of developmental longevity. So what is the truth about the 60-percent rewrite proposition that’s been buzzing the Internet all weekend?

Phil Sim gives us the lowdown on David Richards, the originator of the story in Smarthouse, the magazine he owns.

Robert Cringely of PBS gives us a dark glimpse of Redmond office politics and psychology. If any of it is true, it’s no wonder they’ve got problems.

The real crunch here, we believe, is that with Jim Allchin in the retirement anteroom, and Gates already in Elder Statesman mode, there’s no single coherent technical voice driving the core of the project. They simply can’t make up their minds about the central issues.

A whirl of charge and counter-charge, rumor and innuendo, the usual shifting sands of a large project under pressure, are knocking the operation off-track time and again.

But let’s be clear, January 2007 is only the CES presentation and the release to OEMs (equipment manufacturers). It’ll take some months for the actual preinstalled boxes to make it to the high street. That probably means April/May 2007 at best.

And have you noticed that System Pack 3 for Windows XP has been promised for Christmas 2006? Had they anticipated this delay when that was announced? But we mustn’t add to the speculation.

And what of IE7 for XP? We’re going to need that now.

Microsoft has released a Beta 2 “preview” of its Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), now named Windows Internet Explorer (see logo above).

You can download it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/default.mspx

It has a bit of a Firefox look about it and lots of new stuff. But the PageRank bar doesn’t seem to work, and Bloglines also won’t come up in the browser. There’s quite a lot of stuff not working.

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